“It is worth while to reproduce this pregnant summary of a widespread opinion ... for still the German press daily tells the same tale.... We confine ourselves to Armenia, and here we must indeed agree that it not only would be, but _was_ ‘the most imprudent thing the Porte could do,’ to inaugurate a persecution of Christianity. For the Christians number one-third of the subjects of his majesty, the sultan, and--if we weigh instead of counting them--in intelligence, education, practical ability, and moral energy, they take up two-thirds of the entire population of the Turkish empire.... We cannot blame him [the journalist], then, if he is ignorant of the fact that the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the ‘manifold difficulties of its position’ can be traced back in every case to the opposition between Islam and Christianity as well as to the circumstance that the religious law of Islam--which during the last decades has been more than ever the standard of Ottoman policy--does not admit equality of civil rights, and that any concession in this direction from the Porte can only be regarded ‘in principle,’ i.e., on paper.... “What are the Armenian massacres then? Without any question their origin was purely political, or to state it more exactly, they were an administrative measure. But facts go to prove that, considering the character of the Mohammedan people, whose very political passions are roused only by religious motives, this administrative measure _must_ and _did, take the form of a religious persecution on a gigantic scale_. Are we then, simply because of the political origin of this religious persecution, to be forbidden to speak of the Armenians as ‘persecuted on account of their religious belief’? If so, there have never been any religious persecutions in the world; for all such without exception have been associated with political movements, and even the death of Christ was nothing but a political event, for political moves turned the balance at His condemnation. “We have lists before us of 559 villages whose surviving inhabitants were converted to Islam with fire and sword, of 568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed, and razed to the ground, of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques, of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Gregorian (Armenian) priests who were after enduring unspeakable tortures murdered on their refusal to accept Islam. We repeat, however, that these figures express only the extent of our _information_, and do not, by a long way, reach to the extent of the reality. Is this a religious persecution or is it not?... The most shameful desecration of the churches everywhere, the pollution of sacred vessels ... the spitting on Gospels and Bibles which were then torn into a thousand pieces--these were the mere accessories to the drama of vandalism.